Quinta didn't scream.
She didn't move at all, not even to breathe. She stood in the dim glow of her oil lamp, watching the figure pressed against the fogged windowpane like it had grown there from the storm itself.
The hand on the glass flexed, then curled into a loose fist. The face behind it smiled again—wide and wet—and this time, it spoke.
"Open the door."
Its voice was waterlogged and warm, like the sea speaking through a conch shell. Quinta felt the words more than heard them—echoing in her ribs, humming between her second pair of breasts like a second heartbeat.
Her feet moved before she told them to.
Each step toward the door felt like walking backward through memory. The house creaked around her, the wind howling through broken shingles, but inside, everything was still. As if the air held its breath with her.
She reached for the latch.
Then paused.
"Who are you?" she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
The thing outside tilted its head, hair clinging to its scalp like kelp. Its eyes were silver coins, reflecting nothing.
"I am Frank Frownwater," it said. "And I've come to bring you home."
Home.
The word struck something deep inside her, something buried under years of silence and solitude.
She opened the door.
Cold slammed into the room like a wave. Rain lashed the floorboards. And standing just beyond the threshold was Frank—tall, pale, slick with salt and seaweed. He wore only tattered cloth wrapped around his waist, and beneath it, his legs weren't legs at all—they twisted together like a fish's tail, now hardened into something resembling bone and sinew.
He stepped inside without invitation.
"You're real," Quinta said.
Frank laughed softly. "So are you."
He walked past her, trailing fingers along the walls as if recognizing them. He stopped near the fireplace and turned to face her.
"You remember me," he said. Not a question.
"No," she replied. "But I feel like I should."
He nodded. "You will."
They sat by the fire that night, wrapped in blankets, while Frank told her things no one else had ever spoken aloud.
He came from beneath the sea, from a place called Veythra , where time bent like coral and bodies grew strange in the pressure. There, creatures lived who once roamed the shores freely—before humans built cities and drew lines in the sand.
"We were here first," Frank said. "We shaped the tides. We sang the moon into orbit. But when your kind rose, we were pushed deeper, hidden away in places forgotten by maps."
Quinta listened, silent, her heart beating faster than it should.
"And what am I?" she finally asked.
Frank looked at her then—not at her face, but at her chest. At them .
"You are the return," he said. "A vessel reborn. You carry the shape of the old ones in your body because it is your birthright."
"That's why I'm different," she whispered.
"Yes," he said. "And no. You are not wrong. You are becoming."
Outside, thunder cracked like a warning.
Inside, the fire burned low.
And Quinta began to cry—not from fear, but from relief.
Someone had seen her. Truly seen her.
And they didn't run.
Later that night, Frank showed her how to listen.
He took her to the cliff's edge, where the wind tore at their clothes and the sea below churned like boiling ink.
"Close your eyes," he said.
She did.
"Feel the pull."
At first, there was nothing—only the cold and the crash of waves.
Then—
A pulse.
Deep and rhythmic.
Like a heartbeat coming from somewhere far below.
It matched her own, but slower. Deeper.
And in that moment, Quinta understood.
She belonged to the ocean.
Not just metaphorically.
In blood.
In bone.
In form.
She opened her eyes, and Frank was smiling.
"You'll know soon enough," he said.
"Know what?"
"What happens when the tide rises… and your skin begins to change."